“Mm-hm.” Marissa stabs at her egg whites. Sophie watches the omelet jiggle unnaturally. She once heard that eggs are a complete protein, containing all ten essential amino acids. But not if you eliminate the yolk.
“You two still talk?” she asks, looking down at her bacon.
Marissa looks at Joey and then back to Sophie with an unreadable expression. Then she smiles. “Didn’t you used to text with him?”
“That’s not exactly how I would describe it,” Sophie says. Tanner was a bully and a coward, an irredeemable person who made her hate herself for a very long time. That’s how she would describe it. He even stole her grief—grief for her dead friend that she should have been allowed to work through purely and wholly but couldn’t because he chose two weeks before her death to assault her. Sophie has spent too much time and money unpacking this with her therapist to go into it with Marissa Berg, so instead, she just says, “He used to pick on me a bit.”
“And yet, you still fucked him,” Marissa says bluntly and without pause, adding a small out-of-place smile.
Sophie almost chokes on her morning bun. “Excuse me?”
“I know you two slept together. He told me. He said you begged him to take your virginity, that you loved him, and he felt bad for you so he did it.”
Sophie has an uncharacteristic urge to throw her hot tea in Marissa’s face. She wants, suddenly, to stab her fork into her plump pregnant hand. And she honestly thinks she might do it until Joey stands abruptly. “Okay,” she says. “I think we’re done here.”
“Quinn came to see him, you know.”
Sophie looks up. Joey pauses with her fingers wrapped around the back of her chair.
“I think it was…two days before she died. I was at his house that night. In his room. Quinn came to his doorstep. When he got back upstairs, he was crying. Like, red-in-the-face sobs. He told me about how he slept with you out of pity and how Quinn made him feel guilty and wanted him to dump me to be with you. She was trying to play matchmaker apparently, but he just wanted to be with me.”
Sophie feels goose bumps prickle beneath her clothes as she shares a look with Joey. She doesn’t believe for one second that Quinn would have wanted her to be with Tanner. But the fact that she visited him at his house just days before her death means something. She’s just not sure what.
“Anyway, that’s all in the past,” Marissa says coolly. “Back to present day.” Slowly, she looks up at Joey, who is still standing, then she glares at Sophie again. “You do know the whole town knows what Elena said to her celebrity friends. That Quinn was murdered. Then, Tom Winter tells me you broke into his house. At first, I didn’t believe him because, well…but then it dawned on me that I saw you that day, all of you, in the car heading down Elk Horn Road, toward his house.” She lowers her voice to a whisper. “I don’t know what you three are up to, but this town has its eye on you. And now,Ihave my eye on you.”
Then, she pats her mouth with a napkin and smiles broadly. “Should we get the check?”
34Joey
“Jesus, what happened to you two?” Elena slides a beer toward Joey and a margarita with a half-salted rim toward Sophie.
“Brunch with Marissa Berg,” says Sophie, who is visibly flustered. Her hair is sticking out on one side of her head where she keeps running her fingers through it.
“Oh god, I forgot. How was it?”
The Strike is busy again, although the atmosphere is different than the last time they were here. The rowdy, excited film crew is now subdued, perhaps worn down by the monotony of getting a job done. It’s dim and dull and perfect for the way Joey feels right now.
Sophie leans in, casting a confirming look at Joey. “She thinks we’re up to something. I think she threatened us.” Then she takes a long pull of her drink.
“I’m guessing you didn’t find the book,” Joey says to Elena.
Elena shakes her head and twists up her mouth. “It’s not at Barbara’s.”
Joey hesitates. Then she steels herself. “Me neither. But I did find…something else.”
They blink at her, rapt. “You didn’t tell me that,” complains Sophie.
Joey shrugs. She wanted them all to be together. She needed Elena’s natural-born skepticism so she wouldn’t write this off as nothing. Elena, she knows, will see the bald truth, no matter what it is.
“Just warning you,” she says, “it’s a little weird.” Joey feels a gallop of anticipation inside her chest. “I found a deer antler in River’s closet…covered in old blood.”
“Oh,” says Sophie.
Elena presses her palms against the table as if to push herself away, disgusted.
“And I found this stuck to it.” Joey unfolds the small pink note and smooths it out on the table.
Sophie squirms in her chair while Elena reads aloud. “Ask Joey about bloodspell.”
